Rating System

Jordan_M said
Hey guys, I appreciate that you’re all frustrated and want improvements to things like ratings/support etc – we (Envato) wants that too, but there are reasons things don’t move as quickly as we all wish that they could. Vahid will be posting his quarterly update very soon (I’ve seen a draft).

I get that this was a joke and I’m certain no offence would be taken, and we all need to have a laugh from time to time – but I’d like to ask that you all be respectful of the dev team and everyone else on these forums for that matter too. The devs work extremely hard, a lot of the time on problems you guys wouldn’t be thinking about. They most certainly are not lying in hammocks on the beach!

That said, I appreciate the frustrations and seeming lack of movement (please keep in mind the behind the scenes work which goes into the operation of sites on the scale of the Marketplaces – and how quickly we’re needing to scale the business to match) and threads like this have great feedback which we do monitor and all take to heart. I can’t wait until the day where we deliver a more robust ratings system too.

Jords

Hmm, so authors need to wait next 6 or 12 months, till July 2013 (hopefully that soon) to start getting feedback from customers? And till that time I still have to guess why people are rating items 4 stars and not 5? I still don’t have any tool for tracking what people want, why are they not fully satisfied and it’s frustrating. And I assume thousands of other authors would find it useful (even if they don’t participate in this discussion – perhaps they just don’t know that things can be better and they take what you give them without complaints).

I’m complaining in good faith to improve marketplaces, increase productivity of authors and finally give authors clear feedback from customers. No feedback = wasted time for thousands of authors (especially those starting small businesses thanks to Envato – they need more tools).

The decision we’ve made so far in our small team that works for you: “Don’t care about 20% of people who rate item 1 to 4 stars (because we don’t know why is that) and focus to achieve 80% of happy customers and we are fine with having all items 4 stars (although we could do improvements if we had feedback)”.

And now, let’s say you will add feedback and rating statistics in July 2013. Our items and our account will still remain with 4 stars on average because we registered in 2009 or 2010 and old, poor ratings without feedback will follow us (5 years without “rating tools” = 5 years of decreased ratings because we don’t get feedback from customers). Will we be compensated? Like ratings reset? Perhaps no. So, we will always remain “not that reliable author”. Please consider that, too. At least deleting ratings of deleted items would be a good move for old authors. You can make it “rating per item” only and not global author rating that in our case will decrease our realiability after improvements.

No offence – I’m respectful of the very awesome dev team you have and everyone else here but I’m just suggesting something that thousands of people can benefit from. It’s like upgrade to search engine you did recently – millions of people benefit from it and now thousands of authors can benefit from new rating system. It seems like one of the priority tasks to me.

Hey guys, I appreciate that you’re all frustrated and want improvements to things like ratings/support etc – we (Envato) wants that too, but there are reasons things don’t move as quickly as we all wish that they could. Vahid will be posting his quarterly update very soon (I’ve seen a draft).

I get that this was a joke and I’m certain no offence would be taken, and we all need to have a laugh from time to time – but I’d like to ask that you all be respectful of the dev team and everyone else on these forums for that matter too. The devs work extremely hard, a lot of the time on problems you guys wouldn’t be thinking about. They most certainly are not lying in hammocks on the beach!

That said, I appreciate the frustrations and seeming lack of movement (please keep in mind the behind the scenes work which goes into the operation of sites on the scale of the Marketplaces – and how quickly we’re needing to scale the business to match) and threads like this have great feedback which we do monitor and all take to heart. I can’t wait until the day where we deliver a more robust ratings system too.

Jords

Jordan_M, you know that this answer just doesn’t wash with the community now. How many times have we heard you say the same thing in every one of these threads.

There is no excuse what so ever for not implementing these features. I won’t respect the developers because they are absolutely useless. I know as a developer that whilst you always aim to build and sustain your service you also have to innovate and keep moving forward – something that you guys haven’t done for years.

Look at it this way – Tuts+ got hacked and this was a pathetically easy thing to avoid – if you can’t even employ the basic security techniques then I really feel sorry for the marketplaces here as they will never ever be improved, only when it is too late.

Also, if lack of developers is a problem, why not hire 2-3 JUST to work on new features (and only new features). What’s your excuse for that one?

we only had a change in rating system which no author liked. It was supposed to be the first step, so far it has been the only one. There were infinite discussions/suggestions in the/coming from the community about this subject, If nothing happens, devs are not the ones to blame.

Devs need to work with passion to make better things. In their place I will have worked on the rating system and then showcased and supported it in front of the boss before it’s uploaded online. After that I will wake up because enough dreaming!

To people who ask for envato to hire a couple of developers for two days just to implement the features we asked, I don’t think is so easy as you may think. Is not about writing some code and playing with the database. They need to be careful when they touch databases with 1,801,704 items and 1,777,261 members. Is not like playing with a wordpress website with ten blog posts.

Also, for who said envato doesn’t invest enough money maybe you should calculate how much it cost to hire 10 developers for a year. And, as you may check on this page all those people on “the team” section need to be paid. What about the infrastructure cost? Do you think envato website cost 100$ a month of hosting? And the taxes? This while you need to make some profit, else what business are you?

I’m not justifying anything but we should keep an eye of the global situation.

^ You guys are speaking about hiring or money investment. There are so many things lacking because of less attention and intelligence spent on the core buying – selling area. Half of the complaints and feature requests relies on simple changes; ofcourse rating section deals with database but not everything. All sums up as there is no development at all.